Month: February 2012

If you know me, you know that I’m not much of a gadget guy. I’ve also professed on this blog on many occasions about my aversion to anything that requires batteries or some other element in a survival situation. But every once in a while, technology amazes me. Camelbak, a company I wholeheartedly support, has released a new water bottle which has a UV light built into the cap. With a 60 second burst, the light claims to kill 99.99% of the nasties in your water and it’s rated to last for 10,000 cycles. Meaning if you were to use it to purify all your drinking water every day (3 containers = 96 fluid ounces of water) you wouldn’t need to replace the bulb for ~9 years.

The only downside I see to this thing is that the batteries that power the are built-in rechargables, meaning they assume you’ll have a power source to plug the USB cable in to charge. But I’m sure with some field-expedient ingenuity, somebody would be able to make the cap charge from kinetic or solar energy, making it a sustainable device, which I’m all for.